Motivation

Sometimes we don’t feel good about ourselves and we don’t know why. We don’t have motivation to take action towards feeling better because we don’t know what will help. We try sex, food, drugs, alcohol, shopping, video games, scrolling on our phone, anything outside ourselves to find comfort and a sense of control. Since the root cause is actually inside of ourselves, these things are temporary and fleeting. When we use cognitive behavior therapy, CBT, instead, we have found a practice that gives us lasting peace and the energy to act. We have a method that is motivating because we begin to understand and love ourselves.

Once I worked with a young teenager who wanted to create the “perfect” day for herself. She had figured out that a healthy balance of productive and creative made a day satisfying or “perfect”. She came to therapy because she felt out of balance.

By productive she meant doing things that had clearly defined goals, such as homework or chores. By creative she meant doing things that did not have clearly defined goals, such as exploring with her friends on their bikes or making art.

This young girl had noticed she didn’t feel good if she didn’t “accomplish” by being productive and “wander” by being creative. She had noticed that she felt good about a day when she could reflect that she had both accomplished a planned goal, such as a homework assignment, and wandered spontaneously, such as exploring with her friends.

The problem was that this young girl found it easier to “wander” than to “accomplish”. She noticed she was often not motivated to be productive. When she came home from school, and should have started her chores or her homework, she was not motivated. She would instead drop down onto the couch and look at Instagram. Later she wouldn’t feel good about herself but she didn’t know why she was on her phone instead of being productive.

People have automatic thoughts that they use to talk to themselves. This internal system involves self-evaluation, thinking about what other people think of us, self-monitoring, and self-predictions. Using CBT, we identify stressful automatic thoughts and question them. Working with this young woman, we discovered stressful thoughts about her homework or doing chores. “Chores are boring and my homework is hard and that means I’ll never succeed.” And, “I’m too slow, I take too long to walk the dog, I’m a slow reader, I should get things done faster.”

Upon further investigation, it turned out that this young girl was having invidious thoughts of comparing herself to her older brother. The thoughts were accepted by her as valid until we questioned the idea that she would never succeed and that she should be able to complete tasks at the same speed as her older brother. Is it true? She was able to find an alternative view of the situation, that this was not rational, he was 4 years older than she was! And she immediately felt better.

Our feelings are dictated to a large extent by the way we interpret experiences. When she switched over to a more realistic interpretation, she felt better. She was more motivated to do what she wanted to do. Not only was her mood improved, but also her behavior. She became more animated. She came up with good things she could do to help her do her homework or chores. She felt motivated to ask her parents to help her with her phone, for example. She came up with the idea of giving it to them as soon as she got home from school and asking them to give it back to her only after she had completed her homework and chores. Most significantly, she felt motivated to continue to do CBT, to identify the real cause of her suffering.

According to the framework of CBT, people see things the way they do because this is the direction their cognitive processesing takes them. It has to do with the way people talk to themselves. CBT teaches them how to hear this talk and then to answer themselves.

It made sense to this young woman, once she learned that she had been unconsciously comparing herself to her brother. She was not her brother and although she loved him, they were different people. Before, she had had unrealistic expectations of herself and so was unmotivated. After, she was motivated to do what she is able to do, more realistically, to get the results she wants. To feel good about herself. And when she doesn’t, to look for the reason in her self-talk.

“Your habitual thoughts will shape the character of your mind” wrote Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from AD 161 to 180, in his notebooks that are now called “Meditations.” Once we learn this, we become motivated, knowing now where to look for happiness. “Look inside of yourself. There is a fountain of good there, and it will flow forever, if you will only look for it.” Book VII, Meditation 59.